Mixamo to Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial [2023]

in this tutorial we are going to take an animation from mixamo to Unreal Engine 5 in order to animate our character first you have to go to miximo.com in here you have to create a new account if you don't have one already and once you've logged in go to the characters Tab and here you have to select the character it doesn't matter which one you select I've just selected this one called ninja then when you have select the character go to the animations tab here before you select the animation you wish to copy you first have to use the T pose so up here search for T pose and then select this first one called T pose because we want a standard pose for our character go ahead and click on download and then download again while we are waiting you can visit my website pixelhelmet.com if you're interested in similar tutorials or full game development courses in Unreal Engine I've also released hours of free in-depth courses so you can take a look and see if something interests you let's now open up the epic games launcher and let's launch Unreal Engine 5. you can use your own project if you've already a project maybe you want to apply this animation to a character you already have but right now I don't have a project so I'm going to create a new one I'm going to select this third person template it doesn't matter I'm going to call it Maximo to ue5 again you can use your own project for this in here in the engine I'm going to click on the content drawer and then clicking on Duck in layout so I have this up all the time and now I'm going to go to characters mannequins meshes and here is my character called Mannequin or many and again you can find your own character if you already have one that you want to apply the Maximo animations to now something very very important is if you click on the skeleton of your own character you can see this is the pose my character has right now however for miximo this is the pose that my my character has in miximo and this will cause problems because this pose has to actually look the same as this pose else it will cause problems so we have to adjust this Maximo pose here to our Unreal Engine mannequin pose to do this we need to use blender if you don't have blender already you can download it for free I already have it so I'm going to open it up once you have blender open here you can go ahead and just delete everything in your scene so it's fully empty go to file import fbx and then import the file we downloaded from miximo so this one t pose and I'm going to click on import and you can see this is my ninja character that I imported from miximo in order to correctly pose it like this character so we need a 100 similar posing to have 100 accurate results we actually to do it easily I can right click on this skeletal mesh I can go to asset actions and go to export so I can export my my mesh and use it in blender to pose my other character so I'm going to click on downloads and just go ahead and save this many and just go ahead and Export it and level of detail I'm going to take it off with the Collision as well just like that and I'm going to click on export now let's go back to blender and I'm going to go to file import fbx and selecting this mannequin mesh that we just exported and clicking on import fbx now you can see the Unreal Engine mannequin is in here as well so it's a lot easier for us to accurately pose this character to our mannequin now if you want 100 precise results you have to do it very accurately but I'm just going to do it a little bit quicker for this tutorial clicking on the Skeleton on your miximo character so for example here at the end you can select the skeleton and then go to this tab here and select viewport display and select in front so you can see the skeleton in the front and it's easier for you to work with then when you have the skeleton selected go to the object mode up here select pose mode and then I want you to go down here and delete these two e-frames so select these two keyframes hit delete on your keyboard and you're ready to go now what you can do is Select this bone and while you are in pose mode go ahead and click on the rotation tool and now you can rotate it downwards so you can actually rotate it or just post it similar to The Mannequin here so I'm going to hold Ctrl while I am rotating so it snaps and you can see up here the degrees it's snapping with so this was 60 degrees I'm going to select the other arm and then rotating it hold Ctrl while you are doing it 60 degrees just like this and now you can see it also bends forward a little bit so I'm going to select on this one down here and let's try to rotate this one here hold Ctrl again and something like this so it's not 100 accurate but it's the best that we can do with this time here that we have so here 45 degrees just like the other one and as for the legs we can do it a little bit better as well so I'm going to click on this one and also just rotate it five degrees this way five degrees this way okay so now it's a lot more accurate so what we can do here is we can exit the pose mode so I'm going back to the object mode I'm going to delete this mannequin here so just delete the mannequin so you only have your character left so this is what we have right now go ahead in the object mode select everything go to file export and fbx I'm going to the downloads folder and I'm just going to overwrite my old file it doesn't matter you can save it as a new file if you want to back here in the engine I'm going to find my file and I'm going to import my newly posed miximo character so import it here here in the import options just make sure you don't have any skeleton selected so clicking on this Arrow here or you can click up here and click on clear that's the same thing if you scroll down I'm going to click on this one and click on do not create material and do not import any textures with because I don't really care for this one and we don't really have any animations right now so everything's looking fine I'm going to click on import all now you can see we are going to get some errors because we need to use the t0 as a reference pose so let's do that let me close this down and let me delete those again go ahead and click on save all and right click on the content folder fix up redirect us just so we don't get any errors go back to the mesh folder go to your file again and import it and again just like before make sure you don't have any skeleton selected and materials we don't want that we don't want animations right now and here in the advanced settings click on use t0 as reference pose click on import all now and you can see it Imports now this small error it doesn't mean anything no smoothing groups you can fix this in blender when you export here export your mesh you can fix it by down here in the geometry setting the smoothing to face instead of normal only but doesn't matter doesn't affect anything right now now in order to use our animations in the future from miximo to Unreal Engine 5 we have to create rigs so right click here go to animation and create an ik rig select the miximo skeleton so it's called T pose and I'm going to call it ik miximo double click on this rig and inside of here you have to define the body of this new character so here in the ik retargeting to the right you have to create chains and Define the body of the character so I'm going to click on it a bit of time so I have some of them here so for the first one I'm going to call it head and the next one I'm left and then um writes and then we have the leg left and leg right and then we have the spine so we have those chains now we have to define the start bone and the end bone of this body part so now for the head you can click down here and you can see it starts at neck so you have to select neck over here so searching for neck up here selecting it and it ends up here and if you click on it it says head here in the bones so clicking on the end bone searching for head and selecting it here so for the next one for example the arm left is this one so it starts up here if you click on it you can see it's called left shoulder so clicking over here and searching for shoulder we have this one left shoulder if you click down here if I hit it correctly so over here it's it ends at the hand so you can see it's called left hand so it ends at left hand okay so you have to do it for all of them here so for the right arm it's called probably right shoulder but you can also click on it here and see it's called right shoulder and it's the same as the left hand so it's called right hand over here for the likes you can click on the like up here it's called right up leg and this one is the left one so we have to remember this is the left up leg not the right one and for the right one this is the right up leg okay just just be careful what you're doing here just make sure you're selecting them correctly so the left for the left right for the right and as for the like it ends down here so if you click down here it's the right foot so this is the right one here right foot and for the left foot it's called left foot the last one here is the spine so if you click down here you can see this is another spine this is the center of the character so if you click one more up it's called spine so we can search for spine and select it and the last one is called spine three so you can see spine or spine two spine spine one spine two so this is the end selecting spine two over here the next thing we want to do is click on hips so this is the center of the character this is the root we can right click it and then select new retarget change from selected bones and call this one root click OK and you can see it's going to create this one as well now very very important we also have to select the root of the character so the center of the character and then select a set retarget roots and click save let's close it we have to do the same for our own character so do it for your own custom character or if you're following along we have to do it for this mannequin here let's right click go to animation and select ik rig now we have to select our own character and I'm going to select this one skm Manny we can call it ik many and again let's go inside of here and let's define it just like the miximo character go ahead here to the side and add new chains and just like before call them head um left um right very very important you have to call them exactly the same as what you call them over here in the chain name so the chain names need to be the same so over here I'm left I'm right leg left leg right and spine as the last one so just like before I'm going to go ahead and Skip and do it but just like before go ahead and click on one of them and you can see it's called neck so you have to select the neck over here if I search for it correctly and then it ends down here at the head so you have to select the head as the last one so just do it just like before okay so now I'm finished you can see what I've assigned as the start bone and and bone for everything and just like before for example the leg right I just selected the start of it here and it's thigh right so I signed thyroid and I went down here clicked on the foot and I can see it's called foot right so I signed foot right so just the same method as before let's close it down now now let's right click down here go to animation and select ik retargeter now you have to select which rig you want to copy animations from so you can see here pick ik rig to copy animations from we want to copy from the miximo character so selecting this one here I'm going to call it IKR mix Mo going to enter it here you can see this is the Maximo character and now we have to select which rig we want to copy to and the one I made is called ik many the one you made for your own character select it here and you can see the characters appearing here now we don't have any animations so we can't test it right now so let's get back to the miximo page and now let's select any animation you wish to choose I found this one called chicken dance I think it's funny so I'm going to select this one I'm going to click on download and then download again by the way if you're interested in knowing how to create an animation blueprint for your character or any other subject that you want me to make a video about please let me know Down Below in the comments let's now go back to Unreal Engine and let's take our file here so this is the chicken dance and let's take it down here import it to the engine and in the Importer you have to select your T pose here this is the Maximo skeleton so you have to select this one and we don't want to import the mesh because we already imported the mesh before and everything's looking good go ahead and click on import all and this Arrow here doesn't mean anything so we're going to close it down just make sure it's working just double click on it see if it works okay so everything's working let's go back to the ik retargeter and in here you can now see it appeared so if you double click on it you can see it is working however this guy is sliding and this is because we forgot to set the retargeting route so let's go back here in the ik menu go to pelvis this is the middle again right click here set retarget roots and now it should work so let's close it down click on file save everything let's go back to the ik retargeter and let's double click on the chicken dance you can see now it's working perfectly however a small problem you maybe would notice is the fingers are actually not moving the fingers are not moving you can see the fingers for this guy is moving however the fingers for this guy is not moving now we have to do the same thing again we have to define the fingers so let's close this down let's go back to miximo and just click here and add a couple of chains we have to do the same thing here so clicking on the first one you can see it's called thumb so this one I'm going to call thumb left and um right clicking on the next one it's called index so this is the index finger index left and Index right and then just do it for all of the rest of the fingers okay so you can see I've assigned all of them now so the last one was the pinky right pinky to the right pinky four let's save everything just make sure you have done it correctly just take a look again at all of them you can make a mistake very quickly so just check double check here now close it down now let's do it for the many I know it's a dancing work it takes a long time but we have to do it so we can use the animations correctly again you have to do the same thing for this mannequin so again create them just like before okay I've now assigned all of them and you can see them here and again double check your version of it if everything is correct and when you're satisfied let's go ahead and save everything let's go back to the ik retargeter and click on the Chain mapping and click on Auto map change just so it refreshes and everything is correct let's go back to the asset browser double click on this chicken dance just to see if it works and you can now see his fingers are actually moving so you can see his fingers are moving everything is working correctly as supposed to so now we're ready to copy this animation I'm satisfied so let us click on this animation click on export selected animations and select any folder I'm just going to copy it to the content folder here click ok and now you can see we have copied the animation so if I double click on it you can see it is now applied to our character please hit the like button if this video helped you and subscribe if you're interested in similar Unreal Engine tutorials so you don't miss out on my future videos thank you so much for being here I wish you the best of luck with your game project and I'll see you soon

Channel: Pixel Helmet

Views: 27,941

Keywords: Mixamo to Unreal Engine 5, Unreal Engine 5 animation tutorial, ue5 animation, mixamo to ue5, mixamo unreal engine 5, ue5 mixamo, how to use mixamo, unreal engine retargeting, unreal engine 5 retargeting, mixamo to unreal engine 5, unreal engine mixamo tutorial, mixamo retarget ue5, mixamo unreal engine, unreal engine 5 animation tutorial, mixamo animation, mixamo, animation retarget ue5, mixamo ue5, retarget mixamo to ue5, mixamo retargeting, ue5 mixamo animation, retarget

Id: BTnSMAbu5cI

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022